I’m less concerned with defending it as poetry than defending it as a good idea that accomplished particular goals.
Perhaps worth noting—in earlier versions of this I was paying attention to line length, working in small amounts of rhyme and alliteration when possible. For example:
A mother’s child shares her genes And so a mother loves her child It’s not that hard to comprehend How love could form within the wild.
It probably pattern-matched better as poetry then, but it also became less successful at the thing I was actually trying to do—which was to preserve as much of the original emotional qualities of the prose-version as possible, in a spoken-word presentation. (While making small modifications to tie in with some other material I’m presenting, as long as they didn’t harm the overall impact)
Some of that intent is still present. For example, the opening line:
How, oh how could the universe, itself unloving, and mindless, cough up creatures capable of love?
Is altered from the original:
How, oh how, did an unloving and mindless universe, cough up minds who were capable of love?
With some attention paid to how the words flow, how the lines look, where the syllables land and where the emphasis is. But I found that most of the work didn’t really benefit from that style in the same way.
Perhaps it might be better to refer to it as “Spoken Word Artform.” Poem, play, verse and speech are all subcategories that you could argue about it belonging in, but they’re not natural categories.
The rough metric I judge it by (and what I judge poetry by) is “does it sound beautiful when spoken aloud, or when you imagine it being spoken aloud?”
Edit: honestly I think this is fairly well explained in the OP. I use the word “poetrized” in the title because it’s a single word that approximately captured what I meant, but in the opening paragraphs I say that it ended up more of a play than a poem.
I’m less concerned with defending it as poetry than defending it as a good idea that accomplished particular goals.
Perhaps worth noting—in earlier versions of this I was paying attention to line length, working in small amounts of rhyme and alliteration when possible. For example:
A mother’s child shares her genes
And so a mother loves her child
It’s not that hard to comprehend
How love could form within the wild.
It probably pattern-matched better as poetry then, but it also became less successful at the thing I was actually trying to do—which was to preserve as much of the original emotional qualities of the prose-version as possible, in a spoken-word presentation. (While making small modifications to tie in with some other material I’m presenting, as long as they didn’t harm the overall impact)
Some of that intent is still present. For example, the opening line:
How, oh how could the universe,
itself unloving, and mindless,
cough up creatures capable of love?
Is altered from the original:
How, oh how, did an unloving and mindless universe, cough up minds who were capable of love?
With some attention paid to how the words flow, how the lines look, where the syllables land and where the emphasis is. But I found that most of the work didn’t really benefit from that style in the same way.
Perhaps it might be better to refer to it as “Spoken Word Artform.” Poem, play, verse and speech are all subcategories that you could argue about it belonging in, but they’re not natural categories.
The rough metric I judge it by (and what I judge poetry by) is “does it sound beautiful when spoken aloud, or when you imagine it being spoken aloud?”
Edit: honestly I think this is fairly well explained in the OP. I use the word “poetrized” in the title because it’s a single word that approximately captured what I meant, but in the opening paragraphs I say that it ended up more of a play than a poem.